


The Folklore of Fan Communities

by yourlibrarian



Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Folklore, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:20:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23033104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: Back in 2004 while taking a class on folklore, I started looking at how it related to fandom activities.  I drafted a post with various ideas and, as part of theMarch Meta Matters Challenge, have decided to rewrite it to be more structured.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	The Folklore of Fan Communities

Back in 2004 while taking a class on folklore, I started looking at how it related to fandom activities. I drafted a post with various ideas and as part of the [March Meta Matters Challenge](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/March_Meta_Matters_Challenge/profile), have decided to rewrite it to be a little more structured.

Fan communities and groups, like any other collection of humans, create folklore, and it can be used to analyze both structural and contextual aspects of fandom groups. Folklore is what demonstrates the existence of a community. For example, how do members of a community recognize each other? What signals, forms of dress, habits, or vocabulary spell it out? Does recognition of a certain experience bring a similar reaction among members of that community? What do rituals center around? What does that tell us about what is important within that community? 

I immediately started thinking about how these questions applied to a community I was in the process of joining. Some of it applied to the work created (since transformative fandom is made up of groups organized around creation as well as consumption). But some questions applied to the group interactions and structures that fandom tends to set up for itself. 

**Stories**

For example, a structural analysis by [Propp listed 31 elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_structure) common in traditional stories, all of which do not need to be present but which inevitably follow each other in a certain order. Stories can contain motifs. A collection of motifs can lead to a tale-type. We're all familiar with common tropes in fanfics or even within specific fandoms (such as the "Arthur finds out" stories in Merlin). This gives us some indication of how stories relate to other stories. How do these structures, then, form expectations?

Every fandom has some form of AU fiction that places characters into completely new locations, time periods, settings, etc. Writers (or artists and vidders) recognize that the characters fit certain "types", and then they move those types into different settings-genres. When I first saw "AU" I thought it stood for 'author-universe', not "alternate universe." In some ways that makes more sense! It makes me wonder if the tenet of “canon” isn’t something central to fanfic writing rituals, so much as the recognition of patterns in character development, storytelling, and audience response.

But the canons inform what gets written as well, sometimes in ways we don't think about. For example, television is a format which has developed based on interruption and discrete scenes rather than narrative. It mimics much of the writing in fandoms, which proceeds in installments, or consists of only scenes or even drabble 'images'.

Another thing to look at is how concepts get appropriated. For example, what is an insider's concept, versus an outsider's concept of something that happened in canon? How and when do they become the same thing? And can these interpretations be tracked over time and be used to determine when a person becomes part of a community, or at what stage of community membership they're in?

Another example is what causes something to be termed "fan-fiction'ish"? Do different people use this term differently, such as within and outside of the community? One possibility is that fanfic tends to share traits with soaps -- they focus on dialogue rather than action, and interior feelings. I think it's fairly true that the number of stories heavy on plot vs character and relationships are relatively low in fanfiction. Would an outsider instinctively recognize this and feel that this fits in with canon or makes canon feel different due to its focus?

**Structures**

When it comes to communities, what constitutes "play"? What is "work"? This is an interesting question to consider for communities which are organized around creating things "just for fun", but which most creators would agree can be very hard work and sometimes stressful!

My immediate thought turned to either organized communities (with mods and rules for interaction) or events (such as fests and challenges) as well as online locations -- such as websites, archives, or offerings of resources such as tutorials or screencaps -- which is to say content not in itself considered creative. While fandom can barely exist without these structures and offerings, they tend to go largely unacknowledged in personal terms. It's almost like real work gets hidden in this land of play.

Relating these thoughts back to earlier readings I’ve done in the area of cognitive psychology, rituals can be expressed as schema or scripts. These patterns of behavior, things like the order in which you do things, are formed to make daily life easier. For example, imagine going to a restaurant. It matters, though, what kind of restaurant it is, right? How you interact with people and what steps you take vary if you're going to a food truck, a fast food restaurant, a restaurant with table service, or a fine dining establishment. If you have never been to one of those, you may feel lost. You're not sure what to do. That's because you have no scripts to follow yet, and the ones you do have need to be altered.

Looking at fandom then, what sorts of schema develop and how do they get altered? Fandom structures are also built through scripts, by following examples set by past participants, and which are designed to produce certain results.

For example, what roles do ficathons serve other than the production of more text? Do the incentives of deadlines say something about how people fit this activity into their lives? Does it challenge readers and writers to stretch and try new material, essentially revitalizing the community? 

And does reputation play a role in facilitating or inhibiting this? For example, does the reputation of a particular challenge encourage people to take part? Does it help new writers build a reputation? Does it help established writers continue to signal their presence in a community, or do they tend to participate less once they have developed followings of their own?

What about electronic space, and what the layout of pages indicate or are meant to communicate. Are individual accounts community-directed or simply individually expressive? Is there a difference within a community of performance? For groups that are concerned with artistic production (either as consumers or reactive creators), is there a difference in how people present themselves through digital means and spaces like online platforms? Is it taken for granted that one's audience should be taken into consideration? Does technology allow us to smooth over the way that individual forms of visual expression can be quite hostile to the visitor, and how much would this change what people did if the personal cost was made obvious?

For example, when it comes to fans and fandom who is the central audience to one's posting? The Bystander? The Outsider? The larger cultural audience? In practice it would seem most people are posting to at least a few people who they "know" in some sense, but the fact that these accounts are open and findable suggest that there is a desire for them to be found by others, especially in places like Dreamwidth where entire accounts could easily be locked to only a dozen viewers. Most sites don't really allow the sort of fine grained visibility that is possible at places like Dreamwidth, where you can decide the audience for each post when you make it (or even after the fact). 

I would have said in 2004 that the audience for most people's posts were other known individuals and bystanders, it was almost never outsiders to the fandom community, and certainly not a broad mainstream audience. Now it's less clear, given fandom's colonization of social media spaces which, by design, were meant to grow as large as possible and have the world as one's audience.

**Interaction**

Folklore has other questions to ask, such as what does humor focus on? What is hard to learn about? What is easy to learn about? Where are the silences and gaps? What are the various possible explanations for a behavior or event? 

One question that stood out to me was "If you wanted to deliberately create a community like this, what would be necessary?"

I immediately thought "How would you intentionally segregate women in a mixed fandom?" There are a lot of mixed gender spaces online, _especially_ now that social media spaces are the default rather than the exception. Yet transformative fandom continues, after decades, to be largely female. And while much has changed at a general level for fandom, gender based issues continue to persist unchanged. For example, are there gender differences in terms of not only what gets written but what is deemed "better" and what is implicitly communicated? I think many people would agree that however recognized fanworks have become in the 2010s that they are still not seen as the same as professionally published work, perhaps for the same reason that Romance and YA are not valued. And work that is highly emotional, which could be termed melodrama or particularly self-indulgent, is much more likely to be deemed amateurish or juvenile, even though it is obvious that such work can have a massive audience.

And speaking of audience, interaction is a prized commodity in fandom. Discussion about a canon work is often viewed as equally or even more important than viewing the work itself. This was something noticed in soap opera fans back in the late 1990s by Nancy Baym as she studied soap opera groups. Of course, when fandom discussion is online, one wonders if it is popular because it involves less commitment from individuals than face to face interaction? But I don't think so. I think an experience shared tends to be one that many people find more valuable than something viewed in isolation. Although there may also be many people put off by discussion surrounding a canon. So it's not a given that it always rewards participation.

And because technology has become an integral part of doing a lot of things, including fandom, how do the online habits and rituals facilitated by the technology’s existence (and the way that a platform or device functions) allow people to integrate their online community participation into their social and familial expectations? Is writing the easiest form of communication? Did a family influence lead to this among participants in a text-oriented fandom? Does a writing community form another method of replicating a family that emphasized written communication? 

Also, does one technology influence another? Does the fact that people see so much of the world through television, lead to television being a medium that people therefore write about?

**Difficulties**

An online community allows a variety of advantages: discussion of rumors, bringing in a variety of outside information sources, or the ability to change one’s perspective or focus on a single issue. But there can be a lot of challenges too, with a large amorphous group that really doesn't lend itself to deep connections across many individuals. So do people search for similarity in a fragmented social order, focusing more on points of view than cultural or locational similarities? And is the lack of proximity we experience online a way to avoid diversity? 

For example, how does a major event affect the treatment of newbies in an online community? There are fandoms who may have felt overrun or dismembered by changes in canon. Right now we live in the era of the reboot and the remake. One can think of book fans clashing with movie fans; fans of an original with a remake; fans of the earlier years of a canon clashing with those that came later on. If an older community has just a few people coming in year after year, are they treated differently, even if they bring new ideas, than when there's an influx of people all at once?

And that leads me to considering the endings of things? How are these expressed? There can be many kinds of ending in a fandom. The most common are the end of a canon and how it leads to a drop off in fandom participation, where many communities close or online spaces are abandoned. But there are also more local endings, such as the endings of well known fanfics. Over time there may be an end to certain genres of fanfic, which become unpopular or outdated or unacceptable. And on the individual level there may be an end to creativity, where people are no longer writing or creating art, and have to rethink their identities in relationship to a community where their participation used to have certain elements in it.


End file.
